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Abstract
In a 1961 radio discussion about Black art and its relationship to Black nationalism, Lorraine Hansberry asked: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” James Baldwin quoted Hansberry in The Fire Next Time without citing her—words that circulated widely in the Black liberation movement. Variously attributed to Malcolm X, Baldwin, and King, Hansberry’s role in this literary political genealogy has been unacknowledged. She was riffing on Malcolm X’s idea of Islam as a “flaming fire.” But he also developed his parable of the master’s house on fire after Baldwin quoted Hansberry’s words, using the burning house as a symbol of revolution, class struggle, and the relationship between property and citizenship rights in a racial capitalist system. That Malcolm X influenced the Black Arts Movement is widely acknowledged, but he also read, listened to, and conversed with leftist artists, writers, and intellectuals that influenced the development of his own thought and rhetoric. This article explores the call and response between these intellectuals, their critique of integration, and call for a radical Black art—looking at Hansberry’s seminal contribution to these debates.
Notes
1 Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2011), 329.
2 Martin Luther King, Jr., After Civil Rights: Black Power, interview by Sanders Vanocor, NBC News, May 8, 1967, https://www.nbcnews.com/video/martin-luther-king-jr-speaks-with-nbc-news-11-months-before-assassination-1202163779741.
3 Cornel West, Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America, ed. Kelvin Shawn Sealey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 24; Anthony V. Alfieri, “Integrating into a Burning House: Race- and Identity-Conscious Visions in Brown’s Inner City,” Southern California Law Review 84 (2011): 541–604; Autodidact 17, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: ‘I Fear I Am Integrating My People into a Burning House,’” New York Amsterdam News, January 12, 2017, http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/jan/12/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-i-fear-i-am-integrating-m/; Sharif El-Mekki, “MLK’s ‘Burning House,’” The Philadelphia Citizen, January 19, 2018, https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/mlks-burning-house/.
4 Belafonte and Shnayerson, My Song, 328.
5 James Baldwin et al., “The Negro in American Culture,” CrossCurrents 11, no. 3 (1961): 205–24; “The Negro Writer in America,” The Negro in American Culture (New York, NY: WBAI Radio, January 1, 1961), Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-526-901zc7ss52; Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution (New York: Harper Audio/Caedmon, 1972).
6 James Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” The New York Times, March 12, 1961, https://www.nytimes.com/1961/03/12/archives/a-negro-assays-the-negro-mood-the-rise-of-independent-africa-he.html; James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Vintage, 1992), 72.
7 Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 123, 126.
8 Dylan Rodríguez, “Black Studies in Impasse,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (April 2014): 39–40.
9 Hasan X, “Malcolm X—Debate with James Baldwin,” YouTube.
10 Timothy Tyson writes about “arson as black protest” during slavery, World War II, and the postwar black freedom movement. Timothy B. Tyson, “Burning for Freedom: Black Power and White Terror in Oxford, North Carolina” (MA, Durham, NC, Duke University, 1990); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 262–63, 351n3.
11 Patrick Bernard analyzes the concept of call and response in Thomas W. Talley’s 1922 work on Black folk rhymes, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic. “Call and response” has been key to scholars’ characterization of the African American literary tradition. See Patrick S. Bernard, “A ‘Cipher Language’: Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance,” African American Review 52, no. 2 (2019): 126; Richard Powell, African and Afro-American Art: Call and Response, African Insights: Sources for Afro–American Art and Culture (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1984); John F. Callahan, In the African-American Grain: Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); Patricia Liggins Hill and et al., eds., Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Jennifer Burton, eds., Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). More recently, scholars like Sylviane Diouf have connected this feature of Black music to the Islamic musical tradition of West Africa. See: Sylviane A. Diouf, “What Islam Gave the Blues,” Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College, June 17, 2019, https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-islam-gave-the-blues.
12 “Foreword,” in FIRE!! (The FIRE!! Press, 1926), 1.
13 Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere, ed. Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Michael C. Dawson, “The Black Public Sphere and Black Civil Society,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
14 Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (New York: Scribner, 2017); Amir Sulaiman, Laying Flowers, Setting Fires, 2020, https://sapelosquare.com/2020/11/24/laying-flowers-setting-fires-amir-sulaiman/; Meshell Ndegeocello, “No More Water/The Fire Next Time: The Gospel According to James Baldwin” (Symphony Space, New York, February 26, 2022).
15 Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, eds., Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2013), xvii.
16 Christen A. Smith, Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N.L. Pirtle, and The Cite Black Women Collective, “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1 (May 2021): 12.
17 Rodríguez, “Black Studies in Impasse,” 38; Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): 109–24. West’s earlier article describes this “creative, liberation-focused, and generally radical political-intellectual practice” as “insurgent creative activity on the margins of the mainstream ensconced within bludgeoning new infrastructures” (112).
18 Sun Ra, “Saga of Resistance,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2013).
19 Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin, “A Choice of Two Roads,” November 6, 1960, http://corenyc.org/omeka/items/show/332; Malcolm X, “Bayard Rustin Debate,” Malcolm X Files (blog), November 1960, http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2013/05/bayard-rustin-debate-november-1960.html.
20 Malcolm X, Eleanor Fischer Interviews Malcolm X, WNYC, 1961, https://www.wnyc.org/story/87636-remembering-malcolm-x-rare-interviews-and-audio; Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood.”
21 X and Rustin, “A Choice of Two Roads”; X, Eleanor Fischer Interviews Malcolm X. In the Rustin debate, Malcolm X criticizes Black leaders for having “the Negro masses used to thinking in terms of second-class citizenship, of which there is no such thing. We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad believe that a man is either a citizen or he is not a citizen.” In the Eleanor Fischer interview a few months later, he uses similar imagery to criticize Black leaders that make “the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions. He is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses…making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.”
22 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 152.
23 Julian Mayfield, “Castro’s Visit to Harlem,” letter, 1960, b.7 f.7, Julian Mayfield Papers; Julian Mayfield, “Author Says Cuba Has Solution to Race Problem,” Fair Play, October 25, 1960, 1; Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 221; William Jelani Cobb, Castro: A Friend to Americans of Color?, interview by Ed Gordon, National Public Radio, August 25, 2006, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5709613; Garrett Felber, “A Bandung Conference in Harlem: The Meaning of Castro’s Visit Uptown,” AAIHS (blog), December 1, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/a-bandung-conference-in-harlem-the-meaning-of-castros-visit-uptown/.
24 Edith Sampson, a black delegate to UNESCO, disassociated herself from the US’s vote.
25 Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 120.
26 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926, 692–93; W.E.B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–97.
27 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 217.
28 Ibid.
29 Amiri Baraka, “A Wiser Play Than Some of Us Knew,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 22, 1987; Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 101; Soyica Diggs Colbert, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 116.
30 Perry, Looking for Lorraine; Colbert, Radical Vision, 15.
31 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 12–13.
32 Baraka, “A Wiser Play Than Some of Us Knew”; Amiri Baraka, A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun’s Enduring Passion (New York: New American Library, 1987).
33 Malcolm X: Make It Plain (PBS, 1994). John Henrik Clarke, Malcolm X’s collaborator in writing the charter for the OAAU, spoke about Malcolm X: “He was saying something over and above that of any other leader of that day. While the other leaders were begging for entry into the house of their oppressor he was telling you to build your own house.”
34 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 219; Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hentoff references Hughes’s earlier essay about the nature of Black art.
35 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 121–22.
36 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 220; Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 122; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 88. The audio (although misdated and with a different title) gives a sense of the quick witted banter between Baldwin and Hansberry, the call and response that Perry references in her own quotation of the passage.
37 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 240; Tavia Nyong’o, “Unburdening Representation,” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 44, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 73.
38 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 220. Italics are mine.
39 Julian Mayfield, “Into the Mainstream and Oblivion,” in The American Negro Writer and His Roots: Selected Papers, ed. John Aubrey Davis, Sr., First Conference of Negro Writers 1959 (New York: American Society of African Culture, 1960), 220.
40 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 206.
41 Baldwin et al., 209–10. Discussing the idea of “socialist realism,” Kazin argues that literature does not necessarily reflect the time and place of its writing, but the “past, the present, and the future. No book, either [the black writer’s] book or the white man’s book, can satisfy him about the truth. Because the truth is not only about what he has and what he is, but what he wants to become, and he wants America to become.” Baldwin replies, “I accept the proposition that perhaps we are not so much reflecting life as trying to create it.”
42 Ibid.
43 Joel Whitney, “Lorraine Hansberry Was an Unapologetic Radical,” Jacobin, December 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/lorraine-hansberry-raisin-in-the-sun-playwright.
44 Langston Hughes, “Testimony of Langston Hughes (Accompanied by His Counsel, Frank D. Reeves) before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations,” NPR, March 24, 1953, https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/may/mccarthy/hughes.html.
45 Mayfield, “Mainstream and Oblivion,” 33. Italics are mine.
46 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture”; Mayfield, “Mainstream and Oblivion.”
47 Mayfield, “Author Says Cuba Has Solution to Race Problem.”
48 Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 241. The conference was also covered by the CIA, FBI, and Harold Cruse who was working undercover “to monitor and contain black radicalism,” particularly its relationship to protest movements abroad. Expressions of cultural solidarity were carefully choreographed with the aim of surveillance and containment of dissident revolutionary elements that were variously anticolonial, socialist and communist, and sometimes Islamic. These distinct strands were not commensurate, but had overlapping agendas and aims partly expressed through loose coalitions and solidarities built between different organizations in the Black Liberation Movement both at home and abroad.
49 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture”; Washington, The Other Blacklist, 239–65.
50 Mayfield, “Mainstream and Oblivion,” 31, 33.
51 Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (New York: Holt, 1951); Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1959).
52 Malcolm X and James Farmer, “Separation or Integration: A Debate,” Dialogue 2, no. 3 (May 1962); Francis L. Broderick and August Meier, eds., “Malcolm X v. James Farmer: Separation v. Integration,” in Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), 357–83; Manning Marable and Garrett Felber, eds., The Portable Malcolm X Reader: A Man Who Stands for Nothing Will Fall for Anything (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013), 198.
53 Malcolm X, The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard, ed. Archie Epps (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1968). Malcolm’s image of the American nightmare ultimately led James Cone to develop his own understanding of King and Malcolm X’s differing theologies in terms of the American dream versus the American nightmare. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1991).
54 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 89.
55 Baldwin, 105.
56 Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Ballantine Books, 2015), 3.
57 Malcolm X, “Harlem Freedom Rally” (New York, NY, July 1960), http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.ca/2013/05/harlem-freedom-rally-1960.html.
58 Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture.”
59 Malcolm X, “God’s Angry Men,” New York Amsterdam News, June 1, 1957.
60 Malcolm X, “Young Moslem Leader Explains the Doctrine of Mohammadanism,” Herald-Dispatch, July 18, 1957.
61 Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 237. Tyson is characterizing Williams’s late 1960 and early 1961 speeches in Harlem for Fair Play for Cuba.
62 Lorraine Hansberry, “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,” The Black Scholar 12, no. 2 (1981): 6.
63 Kevin Gaines, “African American Expatriates in Ghana and the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls 1, no. 4 (Fall 1999).
64 Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Malcolm X: Collected Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (1960-65), ed. antihostile, n.d., 13, 14, 15, 35, http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-complete-malcolm-x-40-hours-of.html; Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Phoenix, AZ: Secretarius Memps Publications, 1965), 230.
65 Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 145, 344n74.
66 Rafael Rojas, Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, trans. Carl Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 166–67.
67 Julian Mayfield, “Letter to Arthur P. Davis,” April 4, 1981, b. 4 f. 12, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Julian Mayfield, “Letter to Lorraine Hansberry,” April 5, 1961, b. 63 f. 15, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Rebeccah Welch, “Black Art and Activism in Postwar New York, 1950-1965” (Phd Thesis, New York, NY, New York University, 2002), 2; Perry, Looking for Lorraine, 155. In Mayfield’s April 1961 letter to Hansberry, he writes, “Ossie and I have been thinking that a few of us ought to get together one afternoon to knock around some of the problems that are bound to face us in the near future: Africa, Sit ins, Passive resistance, etc.”
68 Ossie Davis, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-85, Telephone Pre-interview transcript, interview by Madison Davis Lacy, Jr. and Blackside, Inc., July 6, 1989, Washington University Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/dav5427.0777.037ossiedavis.html.
69 Davis; Malcolm X, “Who Speaks for the Negro?,” Muhammad Speaks, October 1, 1961, 1:1 edition.
70 David Tyroler Romine, “‘Into the Mainstream and Oblivion’: Julian Mayfield’s Black Radical Tradition, 1948-1984” (Durham, NC, Duke University, 2018), 148.
71 X, Collected Speeches, 205.
72 Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co.., 2006), 7; Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 45; James Smethurst, “Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement,” in Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X, ed. Robert E. Terrill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
73 Joseph, The Sword and the Shield, 43.
74 Maya Anglou, Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House, 1981), 5–6; Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 179–209; Paule Marshall, Conversations with Paule Marshall (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 181. Angelou would describe Malcolm X in that meeting as “too bright…A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me…Up close he was a great red arch through which one could pass to eternity. His hair was the color of burning embers and his eyes pierced.”
75 John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 341.
76 David Grundy, A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 35.
77 Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood.”
78 Baldwin; Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 72; X, Eleanor Fischer Interviews Malcolm X.
79 Malcolm X, The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard, ed. Archie Epps (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1968), 120, 127. X, Collected Speeches, 30, 32.
80 X, Collected Speeches, 13, 15, 34; Muhammad, Message to the Blackman, 229. In The Autobiography, Malcolm X talks about reading Du Bois while in prison (201). At the Harlem Freedom Rally and at Queen's College, both in 1960, he talked about “a nation within a nation,” as well as at Harvard the following year.
81 Bagwell, Malcolm X: Make It Plain.
82 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 94.
83 Muhammad, Message to the Blackman, 87.
84 Robin D.G. Kelley, “House Negroes on the Loose: Malcolm X and the Black Bourgeoisie,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 419–35.
85 Malcolm X, “Twenty Million Black People in a Political, Economic and Mental Prison,” in Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), 72.
86 X and Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 3. “Suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames…Our home was burning down around us.”
87 X and Haley, 4.
88 Marable and Felber, Portable Malcolm X, 250.
89 X, Collected Speeches, 139.
90 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Malcolm X FBI File 12/38, n.d., 45–46, https://vault.fbi.gov/Malcolm%20X/Malcolm%20X%20Part%2012%20of%2038/view.
91 Andrew Hill, Black Fire (Los Angeles: Blue Note Records, 1964); Archie Shepp, “Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm,” in Fire Music (New York: Impulse!, 1965).
92 Richard Brent Turner, Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 1.
93 Ashley D. Farmer, “The Many Women Mentors of Malcolm X,” Black Perspectives, May 3, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/the-many-women-mentors-of-malcolm-x/.
94 Smethurst, “Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement,” 88.
95 Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), 272, 274.
96 Baraka and Neal, Black Fire, xix.
97 Rolland Snellings, “Song of Fire,” Umbra, no. #2 (December 1963).
98 Lorenzo Thomas, “Askia Muhammad Touré: Crying Out the Goodness,” Obsidian 1, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 32.
99 Lorenzo Thomas, “The Shadow World: New York’s Umbra Workshop & Origins of the Black Arts Movement,” Callaloo, no. 4 (1978): 53–72; Smethurst, “Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement,” 82; Grundy, A Black Arts Poetry Machine, 35.
100 Welch, “Black Art and Activism,” 2–5.
101 Rolland Snellings, “Malcolm X as International Spokesman,” Liberator 6 (February 1966): 6; Thomas, “The Shadow World,” 61.
102 Marvin Jackmon, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” Soulbook: The Quarterly Journal of Revolutionary Afroamerica 1, no. 3 (Fall 1965): 153; Marvin X Jackmon, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (Baltimore, Md: Black Classic Press, 2013).
103 Jackmon, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” Fall 1965; Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, “There’s Still Hell to Pay in Watts: Burn, Baby, Burn,” Life Magazine, July 15, 1966, 34–64; Collier, Jimmy and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Burn, Baby, Burn, The Best of Broadside 1962-1988: Anthems of the American Underground from the Pages of Broadside Magazine (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001), https://folkways.si.edu/the-best-of-broadside-1962-1988-anthems-of-the-american-underground-from-the-pages-of-broadside-magazine/folk/music/album/smithsonian.
104 The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (IFC Films, 2011).
105 Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 107–11. See, in particular, Ongiri’s Chapter 3 on “Black Power, Black Intellectuals, and the Search to Define a Black Aesthetic” that talks about the importance of anthologies for BAM.
106 Rodríguez, “Black Studies in Impasse,” 39.
107 Baraka and Neal, Black Fire, xvii.
108 Orlando Edmonds, “Why James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time Still Matters,” Daily, November 2, 2016, https://daily.jstor.org/feature-james-baldwin-fire-next-time/; Nicholas Powers, “Trapped in a Burning House,” TruthOut, July 30, 2017, https://truthout.org/articles/trapped-in-a-burning-house-a-review-of-i-am-not-your-negro/; El-Mekki, “MLK’s ‘Burning House’”; Kendi King, “America Is Still A Burning House,” The North Star, August 2, 2021, https://www.thenorthstar.com/p/america-is-still-a-burning-house.
109 Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 7.
110 Rodríguez, “Black Studies in Impasse,” 39–40.
111 Kelley, “Malcolm X and the Black Bourgeoisie.”
112 James Baldwin, “How to Cool It,” Esquire, July 1968.
113 Jineea Butler, “Integrating into a Burning House,” The Final Call, December 12, 2014; Ellen McLarney, “James Baldwin and the Power of Black Muslim Language,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 70.
114 Ward, The Fire This Time; Ndegeocello, “No More Water”. The Elevator Repair Service staging of Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (New York: The Public Theater, 2022) dramatizes James Baldwin's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University held only three days before Malcolm X's assassination on February 21, 1965. Baldwin won the debate, with the resolution: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The play ended with a scene showing Baldwin and Hansberry acting out their conversation in the WBAI radio discussion about rebuilding the house.
115 King, Jr., After Civil Rights; Laying Flowers, Setting Fires.
116 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 112.
117 Angela Davis, “Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X,” in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 37, 44, 45; bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women And Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1981), 108; Patricia Hill Williams, “Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism Reconsidered,” in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St Martins Press, 1992); Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews, “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “‘Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black Women, and The Price of Protection,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 216.
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Ellen McLarney
Ellen McLarney is Director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center and the Duke Middle East Studies Center and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture. She is working on two interrelated projects: one on “Black Muslims and Racial Justice in the American South” and another a Doris Duke Foundation Building Bridges initiative featuring Muslim American poets and musicians of African descent. The aim is engaging in reckoning, consciousness raising, and reconciliation through the arts while raising awareness about anti-Black and anti-Muslim bias in the North Atlantic.